Tailoring websites to increase contributions to online communities

ABSTRACT

Many online communities experience insufficient contributions from their members. In order to encourage contributions to the community, we examined a website tailoring approach to fit a community's website interface with the motivations of the community. In particular, we used the characteristics of other websites as a method of gauging user motivation. We built two different websites with financial and altruistic themes, and conducted an online experiment with 122 users to test the impact of both segmenting and tailoring on contributions to a recycling community. Preliminary results show that both tailoring and segmenting techniques were effective with altruistic users.

REFERENCES

• 1: Andrea Basso , David Goldberg , Steven Greenspan , David Weimer, First impressions: emotional and cognitive factors underlying judgments of trust e-commerce, Proceedings of the 3rd ACM conference on Electronic Commerce, p.137-143, October 14-17, 2001, Tampa, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/501158.501173]
• 2: Gerard Beenen , Kimberly Ling , Xiaoqing Wang , Klarissa Chang , Dan Frankowski , Paul Resnick , Robert E. Kraut, Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 06-10, 2004, Chicago, Illinois, USA [doi>10.1145/1031607.1031642]
• 3: Belk, R. W. (1998). Possessions and the extended self. The Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 139--168.
• 4: Butler, B. (1999). The dynamics of cyberspace: Examining and modeling the dynamics of online social structure. Ph.D. Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University.
• 5: Craigslist, http://www.craigslist.org/.
• 6: Freecycle. http://www.freecycle.org/.
• 7: Graziano, W. G., Habashi, M. M., Sheese, B. E. & Tobin, R. M. (2007). Agreeableness, empathy, and helping: a person x situation perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 583--599.
• 8: Marcus, B., Machilek, F. & Schüütz, A. (2006). Personality in cyberspace: Personal web sites as media for personality expressions and impressions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 1014--1031.
• 9: Mechanical Turk, http:// www.mechanicalturk.com.
• 10: Bamshad Mobasher , Robert Cooley , Jaideep Srivastava, Automatic personalization based on Web usage mining, Communications of the ACM, v.43 n.8, p.142-151, Aug. 2000 [doi>10.1145/345124.345169]
• 11: Noar, S., Benac, C. & Harris, M. (2007). Does tailoring matter? Meta-analytic review of tailored print health behavior change interventions. Psychological Bulletin, 133, 673--693.
• 12: Blair Nonnecke , Jenny Preece, Lurker demographics: counting the silent, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.73-80, April 01-06, 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/332040.332409]
• 13: Petty, R. E. & Cacioppo, J. T. (1981). Attitudes and Persuasion: Classic and Contemporary Approaches. Dubuque, IA: Brown.
• 14: Prentice, D.A., Miller, D.T. & Lightdale, J.R. (1994). Asymmetries in attachments to groups and to their members: Distinguishing between common identity and common-bond groups. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 484--493.
• 15: Richins, M.L. & Dawson, S. A. (1992). Consumer values orientation from materialism and its measurement scale: Scale development and validation. Journal of Consumer Research, 19, 303--316.
• 16: Terveen, L.G. & Hill, W.C. (2001). Beyond recommender systems: Helping people help each other. In J. Carroll, HCI in the New Millennium. NY: Addison-Wesley.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Web-based interaction

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
online communities, website design, user modeling